The following relates to print platforms. It finds particular application to selectively distributing portions of a job to one or more marking engines based at least on one or more characteristics of the marking and/or the job. More particularly, it relates to selecting a marking engine, from a plurality of marking engines, to minimize the visibility of marking engine image defects.
In conventional xerography, an electrostatic latent image is created on the surface of a photoconducting insulator and subsequently transferred to a final receiving substrate or medium. This typically involves the following. An electrostatic charge is deposited on the photoreceptor surface (e.g., by a corona discharge). The photoreceptor is exposed, which selectively dissipates the surface charge in the exposed regions and creates a latent image in the form of an electrostatic charge pattern. The image is developed by transferring electrostatically charged toner particles to the photoreceptor surface. The toner particles are then transferred to a receiving substrate or to one or more intermediate transfer elements and then to the receiving substrate. The transferred image is made permanent by various techniques, including pressure, heat, radiation, solvent, or some combination thereof.
With conventional multi-marking engine systems (xerographic or other), one or more portions of a print job may be distributed across at least two marking engines. In many instances, one or more of the marking engines may be in an unhealthy state such that the images they reproduce include defects such as streaks, non-uniformities, etc. One technique used to reduce such defects to a negligible level is to not use the marking engine(s) that creates such defects when the job includes portions that are susceptible to the defects exhibited by the marking engine(s). Thus, during the planning phase for a job, the scheduler may simply ignore and/or not consider such marking engine(s). As a consequence, the marking engine(s) remains idle even though it is not inoperative. This can result in reduced availability, throughput, and system productivity.